Empress Teishi Character Analysis

Her Majesty provided us with the inkstone. ‘Come on, come on,’ she scolded, ‘don’t waste time racking your brains. Just quickly jot down any ancient poem that comes to you on the spur of the moment. Even something hackneyed will do.’ I’ve no idea why we should have felt so daunted by the task, but we all found ourselves blushing deeply, and our minds went quite blank. Despite their protestations, some of the senior gentlewomen managed to produce two or three poems on spring themes such as blossoms and so forth, and then my turn came. I wrote down the poem:

With the passing years
My years grow old upon me
yet when I see
this lovely flower of spring
I forget age and time.

but I changed ‘flower of spring’ to ‘your face, my lady’.

Her Majesty ran her eye over the poems, remarking, ‘I just wanted to discover what was in your hearts.’

There was nothing in [the letter] to justify my nervousness. He had written the line from Bo Juyi, ‘You are there in the flowering capital, beneath the Council Chamber’s brocade curtains’, and added, ‘How should it end, tell me?’

‘What on earth shall I do?’ I wondered. ‘If Her Majesty were here I’d most certainly show this to her. It would look bad to parade the fact that I know the next line by writing it in my poor Chinese characters.’ […]

[S]o I seized a piece of dead charcoal from the brazier and simply wrote at the end of his letter, in Japanese script,

Who will come visiting this grass-thatched hut?

The messenger duly carried it off, but there was no response.

‘Whenever there’s an occasion when people are composing, and Your Majesty instructs me to make a poem, my only impulse is to flee. Not that I don’t understand the rules of syllable count, or that I make winter poems in spring, or write about plum blossom or cherry blossom in autumn, or anything of that sort. But after all, I come from a line of people with a name for good poetry, so I’d like it to be said that my poems are a bit better than the average. When I compose something, I want people to say later, “This was a particularly impressive poem composed on that occasion - just what you’d expect, considering her forebears.” It’s an offence to my late father’s name, to fancy myself as a poet and put myself forward to make some plausible-sounding poem, when in fact what I write has nothing special to recommend it at all.’

When I first went into court service, everything seemed to overwhelm me with confusion and embarrassment, and there were times when I could barely hold back my tears. I attended Her Majesty each night, behind her low standing curtain, and she would bring out pictures and so on to show me, but I was so hopelessly nervous that I could scarcely even stretch out a hand to take them. She described what was in each picture, asked what I thought was happening and generally tried to set me at ease with her talk. […] It was a fearfully cold time of year, and the glimpse of her hands emerging from the wonderful, glowing pale plum-pink sleeves filled me with deep awe. I remember gazing at them in astonishment, still fresh from home and new to all I saw, and thinking, ‘I never knew someone so marvellous could exist!’

‘You see me as some upstart then?’ I inquired, to which another lady responded, ‘More on the level of a stable boy.’ Nevertheless, it was a glorious moment, to have the honour of being permitted to watch from above. No doubt it’s unseemly for me to be boasting like this, and it may well redound unforgivably on Her Majesty’s reputation, by giving an opportunity to those who would set themselves up as shallow judges of worldly matters to wag their heads sagely and declare, ‘To think that Her Majesty should favour such a creature!’ - yet I can only write the facts as they stand, after all. I freely admit that I was of a quite unworthy station to be the recipient of Her Majesty’s special attentions in this manner. […] But these events, which seemed to us so splendid and auspicious at the time, all look very different when compared with the present, and this is why I’ve set it all down in detail, with heavy heart.

Her Majesty provided us with the inkstone. ‘Come on, come on,’ she scolded, ‘don’t waste time racking your brains. Just quickly jot down any ancient poem that comes to you on the spur of the moment. Even something hackneyed will do.’ I’ve no idea why we should have felt so daunted by the task, but we all found ourselves blushing deeply, and our minds went quite blank. Despite their protestations, some of the senior gentlewomen managed to produce two or three poems on spring themes such as blossoms and so forth, and then my turn came. I wrote down the poem:

With the passing years
My years grow old upon me
yet when I see
this lovely flower of spring
I forget age and time.

but I changed ‘flower of spring’ to ‘your face, my lady’.

Her Majesty ran her eye over the poems, remarking, ‘I just wanted to discover what was in your hearts.’

There was nothing in [the letter] to justify my nervousness. He had written the line from Bo Juyi, ‘You are there in the flowering capital, beneath the Council Chamber’s brocade curtains’, and added, ‘How should it end, tell me?’

‘What on earth shall I do?’ I wondered. ‘If Her Majesty were here I’d most certainly show this to her. It would look bad to parade the fact that I know the next line by writing it in my poor Chinese characters.’ […]

[S]o I seized a piece of dead charcoal from the brazier and simply wrote at the end of his letter, in Japanese script,

Who will come visiting this grass-thatched hut?

The messenger duly carried it off, but there was no response.

‘Whenever there’s an occasion when people are composing, and Your Majesty instructs me to make a poem, my only impulse is to flee. Not that I don’t understand the rules of syllable count, or that I make winter poems in spring, or write about plum blossom or cherry blossom in autumn, or anything of that sort. But after all, I come from a line of people with a name for good poetry, so I’d like it to be said that my poems are a bit better than the average. When I compose something, I want people to say later, “This was a particularly impressive poem composed on that occasion - just what you’d expect, considering her forebears.” It’s an offence to my late father’s name, to fancy myself as a poet and put myself forward to make some plausible-sounding poem, when in fact what I write has nothing special to recommend it at all.’

When I first went into court service, everything seemed to overwhelm me with confusion and embarrassment, and there were times when I could barely hold back my tears. I attended Her Majesty each night, behind her low standing curtain, and she would bring out pictures and so on to show me, but I was so hopelessly nervous that I could scarcely even stretch out a hand to take them. She described what was in each picture, asked what I thought was happening and generally tried to set me at ease with her talk. […] It was a fearfully cold time of year, and the glimpse of her hands emerging from the wonderful, glowing pale plum-pink sleeves filled me with deep awe. I remember gazing at them in astonishment, still fresh from home and new to all I saw, and thinking, ‘I never knew someone so marvellous could exist!’

‘You see me as some upstart then?’ I inquired, to which another lady responded, ‘More on the level of a stable boy.’ Nevertheless, it was a glorious moment, to have the honour of being permitted to watch from above. No doubt it’s unseemly for me to be boasting like this, and it may well redound unforgivably on Her Majesty’s reputation, by giving an opportunity to those who would set themselves up as shallow judges of worldly matters to wag their heads sagely and declare, ‘To think that Her Majesty should favour such a creature!’ - yet I can only write the facts as they stand, after all. I freely admit that I was of a quite unworthy station to be the recipient of Her Majesty’s special attentions in this manner. […] But these events, which seemed to us so splendid and auspicious at the time, all look very different when compared with the present, and this is why I’ve set it all down in detail, with heavy heart.